SERVICE MARKETING

Assignment on
Case Study of SERVICE QUALITY DIMENSIONS

Prepared For:
Mr. Arifur Rahman
Assistant Professor Department of Marketing University of Dhaka

Prepared By: FUSION

M.B.A. 13th Batch Department of Marketing University of Dhaka

Date of submission: 11-Dec-11

Group Profile:

Name Omar Faruck Ansari Rutab Karim Md. Aminul Islam Md. Ariful Islam Jeta Majumder Roksana Anjum Tahnima Anjuman Kanij Fatema

ID. No 005 009 027 037 081 083 087 101

RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF SERVICE QUALITY DIMENSIONS: A MULTISECTORAL STUDY

Sheetal B. Sachdev & Harsh V. Verma

arketing practices in service organizations is shaped by specially two major factors. Those two major factors are the environment and the way how a particular business views and organizes its marketing efforts. In the financial service industry there are three major external forces that affect competition are: Increasing competition from the private sectors, changing and improving technologies and the continuous shifts in the regulatory environment. All these led to the long lasting change and growing customer sophistication. Under this challenging financial environment there are three major tasks that a market oriented service organization must accomplish in order to achieve success. Firstly, the marketer must identify the key strategic success factors, secondly, establishing an organizational system to create and implement plan around the companys strategy. Thirdly, the marketer must free the market and infuse and defuse it. Customers perceptions and expectations are continually surfacing which make it difficult for the service providers to measure and manage service effectively. The key lies in improving the service selectively, paying attention to more critical service attributes or dimensions as part of the customer service management. It is an imperative to understand how sensitive the customers are to various service dimensions. The service dimensions provided by the triad PZB- Parasuraman, Zeithmal and the Leonard Berry is used here to examine the relative the importance of service quality attributes that customers consider while buying. The service quality dimensions known as the SERVQUAL. The dimensions are tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and finally the empathy. This study examines the issue of the relative importance of service quality on the three fronts: Zone of Tolerance, Constant- sum-scale, and Regression Analysis. Infact this study intends to measure the importance of service quality dimensions across the following areas: the relative importance of quality dimensions, the service quality performance in relation to the ZOT- Zone of Tolerance and the role of intangibility and the consumers involvement. Here for the purpose of the study four services have been selected namely the banking, insurance, fast food and the beauty salon. The banking and insurance were judged intangibledominating and require less physical involvement, where the fast food and the beauty salon were characterized as tangible-dominating and require more physical involvement of the buyers. The results found from each service sectors are not consistent or in a harmony with the prior result. The five dimensions (SERVQUAL) of service quality enjoy considerable supports in the marketing literature. But the important question that still remains is how to optimally deploy resources among these dimensions. The three methods namely, zone of tolerance, regression and direct evaluation used for measuring the relative importance of service quality dimensions have failed to provide a good amount of consensus on the pattern of them in all of the services. This was true not for any specific services, rather it was the case with all of the services taken up in the study. For example, tangibility is announced least important by Zot. The order is confirmed by regression and direct evaluation for beauty salon. The service providers need to tone up their performance with respect to more service dimensions. There appears to be a total failure in understanding and implementing quality in their services. This may due to lack of sensitivity to customers in services. Analysis of the results on the ground of service context markers: tangible dominating and degree of customers physical involvement was unable to offer any useful insight. The researchers also added several suggestions for further research, they urges to add more dimensions to flesh out the service quality construct. Numerous statistical techniques need to be used to explore more about the consistency of the order of the importance of service quality. Writers also emphasizes on the segmentation of the customers based on demographic variables. The final suggestions from the writers include inclusion of more service categories and large database.